Saturday, April 30, 2016

Apparently,
John Kasich and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) are at their most appealing
when no one is paying attention to them, which, conveniently, is most of the
time.

. . .

Listening to
Cruz always makes me feel like I have Asperger’s. He speaks so slowly, my mind
wanders between words. As Trump said, there’s a 10-second intermission between
sentences. I want to order Cruz’s speeches as Amazon Audibles, just so I can
speed them up and see what he’s saying.

The guy did go
to Harvard Law School, so I keep waiting for the flashes of brilliance, but
they never come. Cruz is completely incapable of extemporaneous wit.

Now that Cruz
has been mathematically eliminated, he’s adding Carly Fiorina to the ticket.
She’s not his “running mate,” but his “limping mate.” It’s an all-around
lemon-eating contest.

. . .

Kasich
is constantly proclaiming that illegals are “made in the image of God,” and
denounces the idea of enforcing federal immigration laws, saying: “I don’t
think it’s right; I don’t think it’s humane.”

When
asked about his decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare — projected to cost
federal taxpayers $50 billion in the first decade — he said: “Now, when you die
and get to the, get to the, uh, to the meeting with St. Peter … he’s going to
ask you what you did for the poor. Better have a good answer.”

He
lectured a crowd of fiscal conservatives on his Obamacare expansion, saying,
“Now, I don’t know whether you ever read Matthew 25, but I commend it to you,
the end of it, about do you feed the homeless and do you clothe the poor.” He
also attributed the law to Chief Justice John Roberts and said, “It’s my money,
OK?”

Voters
thought they were getting a less attractive version of Mitt Romney with Kasich,
but it turns out they’re getting a more televangelist version of Ted Cruz.

They’re
also getting a less warm and personable version of Hillary Clinton. Last week,
Kasich lashed out at a reporter who asked a perfectly appropriate question,
going from boring campaign boilerplate to irritated browbeating in about one
second flat. As much as I enjoy watching reporters being berated, this was
deranged.

Kasich:
Listen, at the end of the day I think the Republican Party wants to pick
somebody who actually can win in the fall.”

Reporter:
But if you’ve only won Ohio?

Kasich:
“Can I finish?”

Reporter:
“If you answer the ques–”

Kasich:
“I’m answering the question the way I want to answer it. You want to answer
it?” (Snatches voice recorder from reporter’s hand.) “Here,
let me ask you. What do you think?

When
giving a speech to Ohio EPA workers a few years ago, Kasich suddenly went off
topic and began shouting about a police officer who had given him a ticket
three years earlier. “Have you ever been stopped by a police officer that’s
an idiot?” he began. He proceeded to tell the riveting story
of his traffic violation to the EPA administrators, yelling about “this idiot! …
He’s an IDIOT!”

Based
on the dashcam video immediately released by the police, Kasich had been in the
wrong, and the officer — you know, “the IDIOT” — was perfectly polite about it.

. . .

Ironically,
it’s Kasich who has been complaining the loudest about the alleged billions of
dollars of “free media” Trump has been getting. It turns out not getting “free
media” was a godsend for Kasich and Cruz.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Ted Cruz just
got thrashed in the five primaries yesterday, so today, he’s announced his VP running mate: Carly Fiorino. No surprise there. Cruz SuperPacs funders( Club for Growth, Keep The Promise and Robert Mercer) transferred funds to Carly’s campaign. See
here and here. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump blogger Sundance runs the numbers following yesterday’s primary results:

The Delegate Math – Going into
last night’s contest Trump was holding 848 delegates (Cruz 559). There
were 175 possible delegates available last night, however 54 are unbound from
PA.

Based on preliminary results, it
appears Donald Trump has swept every pledged delegate in Maryland
[38] (won every congressional district), also Connecticut [28] (won every CD
and took more than 50% statewide), Pennsylvania [17] (statewide
delegates are awarded winner-take-all) and Delaware [16], along with
11 delegates in Rhode Island.

That’s a net pledged delegate gain of
110. However, the math gets better because it appears Trump has also won
45 of Pennsylvania’s 54 “unbound” district level delegates (delegates declared
for Trump, or declared intent to vote for CD winner). So the approximate
gain in delegates yesterday is around 155.

Add those 155 to the previous 848 and
you get 1,003.

The Math Will Move In Direct
Proportion To The Ideology – Most of the media totals will not include
those unbound delegates from PA regardless of who they declared support
toward. Some media totals may include parts or portions of those
unbound delegates – so you can expect to see some significant disparity depending
on which media outlet is presenting their version of the data.

EXAMPLE: CNN has a total for
Trump of 988 (LINK) – The New York Times has 950 (LINK) – Politico is also using 950 (LINK) – and Green Papers has 956 (LINK). It
appears CNN is using “some” of the unbound PA delegates, and the latter three
are not using any.

However, the fact that Donald Trump
has resoundingly won every congressional district in Pennsylvania, and the fact
Trump won the entire state with 57% of the vote total, gives Team Trump an easy
leverage point to advance the argument they are entitled to the
support of all 54 unbound Pennsylvania delegates. Again, it appears
45 of them are already pledged to Trump or have agreed to vote for the CD/State
winner.

Conservatively it is fair to say
Donald Trump has won, at a minimum, 1,000 delegates as of this moment.

The goal is to reach 1,237. But
again, let’s be conservative and say –Moving Forward– Trump needs another
250 just for safe measure. 250 more delegates will easily put him over
the top with wiggle room.

There are 502 delegates remaining in
the next six weeks. Indiana (next Tuesday) is holding 57 of those:

27 are district allocated to the
winner in each of the 9 congressional districts. Whoever wins the
most votes in that district will receive all 3 convention delegates.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Calling community activists: If
you’re a committed, left-leaning activist who’d like to take part in
“grassroots campaigns to protect the health, economy, environment, and
livelihood of Ohio communities,” then Ohio Citizen Action has got a job for
you.

And it’s one that pays
reasonably well, with benefits on top. This could be an especially nice deal
for recent college graduates looking to help create a little drama in Cleveland
when the Republican National Convention convenes
in July.

Just google Craigslist and Ohio Citizen Action,
and you get an advertisement that declares: “Change the World and GET PAID …
$80/day (Downtown Cleveland).”

You’ll learn the nonprofit
group seeks candidates who “possess strong communication skills and a genuine
commitment to the environment, progressive politics, and the empowerment of our
fellow OH residents.”

The ad, specifying Cleveland,
says positions are full time and pay $80 a day, with bonuses available at 20
days.

Applicants should expect to
work from 2 to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. And yes, they should be
committed to community organizing with an eye toward “environmental justice”
and “sustainable energy.”

“Getting paid to participate in
a supposedly ‘grassroots’ campaign is a contradiction in terms,” quipped Hans
von Spakovsky, a senior
legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, in an email to The Daily
Signal.

Community organizing is the
backbone of OCA and each year it allows us the opportunity to continue building
the strength in numbers that has won so many of our campaigns. We are looking
to add highly motivated individuals with good communication skills to our
already effective and professional campaign staff. Also, if you are truly
looking for nonprofit grassroots organizing experience, we do it all year, and
not just when it gets nice out in the spring and summer!

Perks and benefits apparently
are available for those willing to stick with it.

“Health insurance, paid
vacations and personal days to employees that show longevity and proficiency
with the organization,” the group’s ad promises. “Travel opportunities within
our nationwide network of nonprofits for environmental and social justice causes.”

What the ad says is revealing,
but what it doesn’t say is perhaps more so.

Donors to the nonprofit get tax
deductions, skeptics note. Is Ohio Citizen Action really the employer? Is it
legitimate for a tax-exempt charity to use donations to protest and engage in
political activism?

Ohio Citizens Action has
received $30,000 since 2006 from Tides Foundation and $20,000 since 2013 from
the William B. Wiener Jr. Foundation, according to data compiled by the Capital
Research Center, a Washington-based nonprofit that tracks charity and philanthropy.

In addition, the affiliated
Ohio Citizens Action Education Fund has received almost $3.9 million from
left-wing philanthropies since 2003. Major funders include the Joyce Foundation
($1.4 million since 2003), Rockefeller Family Fund ($595,000 since 2010),
Energy Foundation ($422,000 since 2008), Winslow Foundation ($425,000 since
2007), and George Gund Foundation ($525,320
since 2003).

Read
the rest, including reference to an earlier incarnation of the community activist outfit,
ACORN, here.

In
case you missed it, here’s the bottom line from elections.apon the GOP race for the nomination:

Donald Trump is now the only
Republican candidate with any chance of clinching the nomination before the
convention.

Ted Cruz was mathematically
eliminated Tuesday after Trump's big win in the New York primary.

Trump won at least 89 of the 95
delegates at stake. John Kasich won at least three and Cruz was in danger of
being shut out.

There aren't enough delegates
left in future contests for either Cruz or Kasich to reach the 1,237 delegates
needed to win the GOP nomination. Their only hope is to block Trump and force a
contested convention.

The AP delegate count:

Trump: 845.

Cruz: 559.

Kasich: 147.

Is
Tea Party Patriots going to continue to endorse Ted Cruz, whose only shot at
the nomination is to somehow influence the first vote at the convention,
whether by dishonesty or outright theft? (I don’t think Cruz would
stand a chance in a contested convention; he’d be thrown over in favor of other
more “electable” candidates. Romney? Ryan? More of the same ole same ole…)

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Okay, Ann Coulter is a bomb-thrower, but she also
can hit the nail squarely on the head. Her column the other day was about the “voterless”
primary elections, in which GOPe “leaders” are giving delegates to candidates
whether the electorate likes it or not. Wisconsin. Colorado. Wyoming. Is West
Virginia next? Here are extracts from her column

Another
misconception sweeping the nation is that when state Republican parties
disregard the voters and give all their delegates to Cruz, they are merely
following THE RULES, and Trump is an idiot for not knowing THE RULES.

That's what
the Colorado GOP did, what the Tennessee and Louisiana parties are trying to do
-- and what many other states may do, all under the careful tutelage of Tracy Flick Cruz.

I
keep asking someone to send me a copy of THE RULES that direct state parties to
ignore the voters and pick their own slate of delegates, but no one can cite such
a rule. So I read through "The
Rules of the Republican Party" myself -- and guess what? There's no
rule instructing state parties to ignore the voters!

Apparently,
what people mean by THE RULES is that there is no RNC rule specifically prohibiting a
state party from giving all the delegates to a single nominee, even if that is
demonstrably at odds with the will of the voters.

The state
parties are given a lot of discretion, so Cruz harasses and cajoles the local
party until it awards all the state's delegates to him. Trump keeps winning
elections, and Cruz keeps winning sneaky procedural victories.

Until Cruz won a primary in mean-as-a-snake Wisconsin, he hadn't won a single
primary -- i.e., an "election" -- outside of his home state, a sister
state and a state where Trump didn't campaign. In fact, until cantankerous
Wisconsin, the only primary where Cruz managed to surpass 34 percent of the
vote was his home state of Texas -- where he got 43.8 percent.

(Contrary to lies
you read in The New York Times, Trump has not complained about any of those
races. And you know why? Because they were elections, not corrupt backroom
maneuvering. Hey - does anyone know if the general election is won by
influence-peddling with tiny groups of insiders or is it by winning elections?)

It's as if
Cruz and Trump are playing different sports: Trump keeps belting home runs,
while Cruz is berating the umpire until he calls a balk, then prances to home
base, telling everyone he hit a grand slam.

True, there's
no rule explicitly disallowing a state party from rigging the delegate
selection. There's also no rule explicitly disallowing a state party from
giving all its delegates to Kim Kardashian.

Cruz is bragging about winning
delegates in “voterless” elections, as the Drudge Report and other media dub them.
Trump's “campaign strategy is to win with the voters.
Ted Cruz’s campaign strategy is to win despite them.”

Does anyone really
believe GOPe chairman Reince Priebus when he says “It's not a matter of party insiders. It's
a matter of 2,400 grassroots activists, and whatever they want to do, they can
do.”

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Three patriot
delegates from the Lakes Area Tea Party in Michigan will be attending the GOP
Convention July 18-21 here in Cleveland, and they are looking for affordable
rooms to rent or courtesy housing. If you are in a position to host these
individuals, please email clevelandteaparty@gmail.com

and we will forward your email to the leader of the group so you can work out
details.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

The other day, this blog referred to Ted Cruz's dirty tricks in Colorado. The backstory is still unfolding, but it looks like Team Cruz worked with the GOP elites in Colorado, within the framework of their rules. The net result is that Colorado voters are disenfranchised by those rules. The GOPe takes full credit for getting delegates for Ted, an establishment insider. As the Drudge headline said, it was a "voterless victory."American Thinker reproduced the resolution to exclude Donald Trump as a candidate for Colorado GOPe delegates. From another tweet from "Former CO GOP Chair: "The Message We're Sending Is Your Vote Doesn't Matter and Doesn't Count." The Colorado GOPe party controlled the selection. It followed the rules, and Colorado voters are going to protest those rules on Friday.

Conservative
icon Phyllis Schlafly has
been a national leader of the conservative movement since the publication of
her best-selling 1964 book, A Choice Not An
Echo. She has been a leader of the pro-family movement since 1972 when she
led the fight to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.

But not
everyone in her organization, Eagle Forum – or her family – agreed with Phyllis
Schlafly’s decision.

Last week
Phyllis Schlafly released
several board members for disloyalty to the organization.
The group was planning to hold rogue board meeting to take over the Eagle
Forum.

Today the
rogue Cruz supporters attempted a coup.

They held a
non-sanctioned meeting and blocked Phyllis Schlafly from their conference call.

This email was
sent out Monday afternoon.

St. Louis,
Missouri:

“At 2pm today,
6 directors of Eagle Forum met in an improper, unprecedented telephone meeting.
I objected to the meeting and at 2:11pm, I was muted from the call. The meeting
was invalid under the Bylaws but the attendees purported to pass several motions
to wrest control of the organization from me. They are attempting to seize
access to our bank accounts, to terminate employees, and to install members of
their own Gang of 6 to control the bank accounts and all of Eagle Forum.

“The members
of their group are: Eunie Smith of Alabama, Anne Cori of Missouri, Cathie Adams
of Texas, Rosina Kovar of Colorado, Shirley Curry of Tennessee, and Carolyn
McLarty of Oklahoma.

“This kind of
conduct will not stand and I will fight for Eagle Forum and I ask all men and
women of good will to join me in this fight.”

Sunday, April 10, 2016

I
used to like Brent Bozell. I always looked forward to his guest spot on
Thursdays with Sean Hannity. He’s spoken at Tea Party events. I thought he was
a good guy.

Diana West just published an open letter to him on his support of networks banning
Roger Stone (h/t Breitbart Big Journalism; see Ralph's earlier CTPP blog on Stone here). And in light of the just-in reports of Cruz’s very dirty tricks in
the Colorado GOP delegate selection process (see here and here), I thought I
would share her article in full (WARNING: X-rated Bad language alert):

The PCE, Pt. 16: Brent Bozell and the
Stone Standard

Written by:Diana West

Friday, April 08, 2016 6:11 AM

To: Brent Bozell

I read the statement you made as president of the Media
Research Center, applauding CNN and MSNBC for banning Trump supporter Roger
Stone from their presidential election coverage.

CNN, Politico reports, banned Stone in
February over his tweets about Jeb Bush supporter and CNN analyst Ana Navarro
(Stone called her “Entitled Diva Bitch,” “Borderline retarded,” and “dumber
than dog s---” [stet]). The MSNBC ban follows Stone's recent radio discussion
of his planned Stop the Steal movement at the upcoming GOP convention in
Cleveland, in which, as Breitbart reports, he said there would be protests,
demonstrations and that

we will disclose the hotels and the
room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal. If
you’re from Pennsylvania, we’ll tell you who the culprits are.

We urge you to visit their hotel and
find them. You have a right to discuss this, if you voted in the Pennsylvania
primary, for example, and your votes are being disallowed.

You then wrote that such threats

and his [Stone's] long history
of incendiary and offensive rhetoric add no value to the national
discourse. ... Stone is a thug who relishes personal
insults, character assassination, and offensive gestapo-like
tactics that should be unequivocally dismissed by civil society, most
especially those who might give him a platform from which to spew his
hatred.

The news media have for far too long
ignored Stone’s inflammatory words. I hope all media outlets that
lament the debasement of political dialogue and the gutter
politics for which Stone is infamous follow the lead of CNN and
MSNBC. The media should shun him. He is the David Duke of
politics. Those with whom he is affiliated should denounce him in
no uncertain terms.

Having seized these non-partisan
heights of rhetorical-cleansing -- which has nothing to do with your visceral
opposition to Donald Trump (whom Stone supports) -- I will assume this is only
your first step.

That is, Stone Standard in hand, you
must be now turning your cleansing energies toward the rest of the Right, where
public rhetoric of crudity and intimidation very often exceeds that of former CNN
and MSNBC commentator Roger Stone, Hated One.

No? Not yet? You're not aware? Allow
me to be of help. I have been creating what I call the Right's Anti-Trump Lexicon by logging the vile, the
vicious, the violent, the demonizing, the patronizing, the vexed, the childish,
the angry, the dehumanizing language used by GOP and conservative commentators
and professionals to revile Trump and millions of Trump voters.

As an example, I can offer you two
excellent candidates for your consideration, according to your own Stone
Standard.

With this one vicious, deviant tweet,
well-known GOP professional Wilson has hit virtually every lowest marker of the
Stone Standard -- "incendiary and offensive rhetoric," "personal
insults," "character assassination," etc. -- instantly resulting
in "the debasement of politicial dialogue." Indeed, the public square
is forever rancid.

There's more.

Wilson uses irresponsibly violent
language to discuss the Trump candidacy, actually invoking the assassination of
Donald Trump and the summary execution of his supporters.

For example: The donor class "are
still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump. And
that’s a fact,” Wilson said on MSNBC.

A "bullet"? I'm sure you
find this not only "incendiary and offensive," but also dangerously
"inflammatory."

Wilson, among others, has further
corrupted our democratic discourse with bizarre revenge scenarios. Trump
supporters, Wilson has tweeted, are no better than "collaborators"
"Vichy Republicans," who may face "epuration sauvage"
(summary executions) "up against a wall."

Where Roger Stone denigrated the
intelligence of his CNN colleagues, Rick Wilson does the exact same thing to
Trump supporters, dismissing them all as "low-information voters."
Further: "Most of them [Trump supporters]," Wilson stated on MSNBC,
"are childless single men who masturbate to anime."

Is there not something wrong with
political "analysis" that makes a viewer want to take a bath?

A second candidate for your
consideration is National Review's Kevin Williamson, a regular commentator on
MSNBC, CNN and Fox News. Like Wilson, Williamson is another one who has
exceeded the Stone Standard, and with similar sicko touches. "The gross
thing is, you can kind of imagine a Trump sex tape," he wrote in
National Review.

Since you took exception to Roger
Stone tweeting that his CNN colleague was a "bitch," I am sure you
will be similarly outraged by Williamson tweeting that Donald Trump was a
"bitch." And not just any kind of a "bitch."

Such talk -- and there is much more --
from the director of the "William F. Buckley fellowship in political
journalism" debases more than political dialogue, no?

In an essay originally titled
"Father-Fuhrer" (Trump -- get it??), Williamson expresses more group-rancor,
more group-hatred than I've seen from any other "thought leader" --
outside Black Lives Matter or the Cultural Revolution, that is -- asserting
that white working class communities, where support for Trump is strong,
"deserve to die."

"Deserve to die"? Once
again, we see the Stone Standard exceeded. Stone, after all, called for Trump
voters to "discuss" the possible steal of their votes with delegates
who may do the stealing -- fraught and ill-advised enough, to be sure. He has
not, however, asserted that anyone -- including delegates breaking trust with
primary voters -- "deserve to die."

If this is not beyond the pale, what
is?

Williamson, too, castigates Trump
supporters, calling these Americans he disagrees with, "bad citizens with
defective judgement." Further, he has written in the pages of National
Review that they are "engaged in the political version of masturbation: sterile,
fruitless self-indulgence."

What it is with these two men and
masturbation is not, Glory Be, our concern; rather, it is their hellish level
of discourse. I am wondering whether you will be issuing another righteous
statement, as you did regarding Roger Stone, calling for "the media to
shun" this noxious pair (and others, as you will see) and "denounce
[them] in no uncertain terms"?

Somehow, I doubt it.

It is
similarly sickening to see the primary process corrupted, whether by
intimidation, interference, or payoffs, and those we thought were conservative-value
commentators have little, if anything to say about that corruption.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Below is the response from Roger Stone in regards to the blatant lies of CNN reporting on his interview with Stefan Molyneux (Click to watch) regarding alleged calls for violence in challenging delegates at the RNC Convention

Trump is right the press is so dishonest. They used a truncated video clip of my interview with Stefan Molynneux suggesting I said we'd go to the hotels of delegates, implying I am advocating violence.Here is what I said about the Stop the Steal March Cleveland, as reported by Breitbart.“We’re going to have protests, demonstrations. We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal,” Stone stated in a radio interview with Philadelphia's Dom Giordano the same day.“If you’re from Pennsylvania, we’ll tell you who the culprits are,” Stone threatened. “We urge you to visit their hotel and find them. You have a right to discuss this, if you voted in the Pennsylvania primary, for example, and your votes are being disallowed.”DISCUSS! Where is the threat of violence? We the people who VOTED for these delegates have a RIGHT to engage them.The GOP is going to lose MILLIONS of new voter, disillusioned democrats and independents if this nomination is stolen from Donald Trump. Only Trump can win. We have a right to make our case.Join me for the Stop the Steal Rally July 18-21!

Sign up by emailing stopthesteal@gmail.com or by calling 1.855.245.4634.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Diana
West is the author of The Death of the Grown-Up, a book I found provocative and persuasive (and alarming). The
other day, she looked at the amicus brief filed by Senators opposing Pres. Obama's Executive amnesty (see earlier CTPP blog here, spotlighting Sen. Portman’s absence from the roster of Senators) and headlined her report:

That would be the same
executive amnesty that Houston global immigration superlawyer Charles C. Foster
publicly supports. And that would be the same Charles C.
Foster, profiled here, with whom Ted Cruz worked to craft
Candidate Bush 43's immigration program in 2000; and whom Cruz recently called
up to invite onto his presidential campaign finance committee as a fundraiser.

Foster obliged, bringing the balance of the ex-Bush finance committee with him
to Team Cruz.

This campaign seemingly of
cross purposes is worth a serious double take. It's as if a candidate was
championing Israel while a Hamas supporter was raising money for him; or
passing himself off as an immigration patriot while some open-to-no-borders
enthusiast was bundling bucks for the cause.

Sorry
to say, this Cleveland Tea Party person cannot go along with Tea Party Patriots’
endorsement of Ted Cruz. He is indeed a Trojan Horse.